Religious Right is scared of the Tea Partys?

[MadImmortalMan]

Tea parties stir evangelicals' fears




The rise of a new conservative grass roots fueled by a secular revulsion at government spending is stirring fears among leaders of the old conservative grass roots, the evangelical Christian right.

A reeling economy and the massive bank bailout and stimulus plan were the triggers for a resurgence in support for the Republican Party and the rise of the tea party movement. But they've also banished the social issues that are the focus of many evangelical Christians to the background.

And while health care legislation has brought social and economic conservatives together to fight government funding of abortion, some social conservative leaders have begun to express concern that tea party leaders don't care about their issues, while others object to the personal vitriol against President Barack Obama, whose personal conduct many conservative Christians applaud.

"There's a libertarian streak in the tea party movement that concerns me as a cultural conservative," said Bryan Fischer, director of Issue Analysis for Government and Public Policy at the American Family Association. "The tea party movement needs to insist that candidates believe in the sanctity of life and the sanctity of marriage."

"As far as I can tell [the tea party movement] has a politics that's irreligious. I can't see how some of my fellow conservatives identify with it," said Richard Cizik, who broke with a major evangelical group over his support for government action on climate change, but who remains largely in line with the Christian right on social issues. "The younger Evangelicals who I interact with are largely turned off by the tea party movement — by the incivility, the name-calling, the pathos of politics."

There's no centralized tea party organization, and anecdotes suggest that many tea party participants hold socially conservative views. But those views have been little in evidence at movement gatherings or in public statements, and are sometimes deliberately excluded from the political agenda. The groups coordinating them eschew social issues, and a new Contract From America, has become an article of concern on the social right.

The contract, sponsored by the grass-roots Tea Party Patriots as well as Washington groups such as FreedomWorks and Americans for Tax Reform, asks supporters to choose the 10 most important issues from a menu of 21 choices that makes no mention of socially conservative priorities such as gay marriage and abortion.

"They're free to do it, but they can't say [the contract] represents America," said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, a veteran of the Christian right. "If they do it they're lying."

Groups such as FreedomWorks, said Perkins, bring a libertarian bias that doesn't represent the "true tea parties." Brendan Steinhauser, the director of federal and state campaigns at FreedomWorks, responded that the contract represents activists' priorities.


"People didn't come out into the streets to protest gay marriage or abortion," said Steinhauser, who said that he hoped the Republican Party would follow the contract's cue and "stop bringing up flag-burning amendments and the gay marriage thing when they're not what people are focused on."

There's little data on the disparate tea party movement. One small CNN survey of self-identified tea party activists found that 68 percent identify themselves as Protestants or other non-Catholic Christians, as opposed to just 50 percent in the general population. Only 9 percent of the activists say they're irreligious, as opposed to 14 percent in the broader sample.

But an in-depth study of 49 tea party leaders by the free-market oriented Sam Adams Alliance suggested that the leadership consciously avoids social issues and plans to continue doing so.

"None of them chose social issues as the sole direction for the movement," said the group's marketing director, Anne Sorock, who oversaw the study.

She said that while many of the leaders held conservative views on social issues, "they were completely adamant that [the issues] were not a part of their agenda for the long term."

"Across the board everyone had the same answer: It's so important that they achieve their goals that social issues cannot distract them, because they need to cast the widest net of consensus with the widest group possible," she said.

The rise of the fiscal and economic conservative grass-roots has been cause for celebration in the socially liberal wing of the Republican Party.

"The folks who are upset about it are big government conservatives for whom the marriage with the GOP was never a good fit to begin with," said Chris Barron, the chairman of the board of the gay conservative group GOProud.

It's also good news to a generation of evangelical leaders who are either outside, or openly hostile to, the traditional Christian right.

"I don't think younger Christians are all that interested in the tea party movement. We aren't as solidly committed to the Republican Party, or any party for that matter," said Jonathan Merritt, a younger evangelical not aligned with the GOP who described his generation in an e-mail as "increasingly dissatisfied by a myopic Republican party that seems unwilling to tackle important social justice issues," but also unable to join a Democratic Party that "seems unwilling to promote a culture of life."


It's easy to overstate the depth of concern on the part of social conservatives. Fischer, Perkins, and other figures were quick to add that they feel an affinity for the tea party movement.

"The reason for it is fundamentally secular, but a lot of people involved in it are not secular," said Richard Land, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. "I don't see the tea party movement as a threat at all — I see it as additional allies and fellow travelers."

But while Land and other Christians sympathize with the movement's limited-government focus, they have been repelled by another aspect of the contemporary right: The vitriolic attacks on Obama.

A prominent Atlanta evangelical public relations man, Mark DeMoss, recently wrote Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele to denounce as "shameful" a fundraising presentation obtained by POLITICO that advised appealing to "fear" and portrayed Obama as the sinister Joker from Batman, over the word "Socialism" — an image drawn from a poster popular at tea party events.

Land said liberals can be equally faulted for demonizing Sarah Palin, but said that if he were an RNC donor, he'd stop giving.

"What [liberal blogs] do with Sarah is just really unacceptable and dastardly, but that doesn't mean we should respond in kind," he said. Obama, he said "provides a tremendously positive role model for tens of millions of African-American men" and "seems demonstrably fond of his wife and children, which is a positive role model for people of all ethnicities."

"I would want to be free to attack the character of President Clinton — but this guy, he gives every indication of being a decent guy," Land said.

Worries about being out of step with the rest of the conservative movement surfaced most visibly last month in Washington during the Conservative Political Action Conference, which invited the gay Republican group GOProud to be a co-sponsor, and where one audience booed a speaker who criticized that decision.

Former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee denounced the conference (with whose organizers he has feuded in the past) as a gathering that had become "increasingly more libertarian and less Republican."

GOProud's Barron, meanwhile, met with a warm reception, as he had, he said, during the giant Tea Party march on Washington last fall.

The veteran conservative activist Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, said he found himself soothing social conservative fears about the Tea Parties at a recent gathering of the socially conservative Council for National Policy.

"They shouldn't be nervous," he said. "When the Republican Party and the modern conservative movement grows, that's good for everybody."

A split in the GOP over this in the works? Some of the guys they quoted there seem a bit weird to me. I can't imagine a Republican using the term social-justice in a non-pejorative way, for example. And that Merritt guy wrote a book about how God is Green ( I googled him, it made me suspicious). I wonder how big a slice of the GOP pie is represented by people who would be completely siding with Democrats if it weren't for abortion and gay marriage. I can't imagine it's huge.

It's no secret that libertarian-types and religious-types are not super-compatible ideologically, but I've always looked at that difference as one more of focus and emphasis than one of outright conflict. What I mean by that is, that most evangelicals don't mind cutting taxes. It does seem a bit like the Tea Party faction is making no bones about the fact that they intend to completely ignore issues important to the religious faction though. (The ideological conflict for them seems like it would be stronger--I dunno.)


If the fundies do bail, can the GOP win anything without them? I know they might not be a massive chunk of the party, but they're certainly a loud one. And one big enough to make the party a lot less competitive if they stay home.

[Fate]

The GOP won't be split. Both sides care more about action-less tax rhetoric than God or the Constitution.

[Josquius]

This I find to be quite important

But they've also banished the social issues that are the focus of many evangelical Christians to the background.

America is weird really, its the only place where you still get real right vs. left (that comes right to mind, there obviously are others)
Economic concerns are very much secondary, the true right vs. left stuff is social issues and on these in Europe the left has long since won and the right packed in and politics became about the battle for the centre with 'gays are fine, abortion is up to you, etc...' being just utterly the norm (in the UK at least. Not going to speak for the whole of europe with that one...)
Interesting development if this is true.

[DGuller]

I always wondered how Libertardians and Jesus freaks managed to co-exist in one party, given how the guiding philosophies of those groups are so different.  It turns out the answer is "very tenuously".

[sbr]

I've always been intrigued by the "every life is precious and sacred" v. pro-capital punishment dynamic.

[MadImmortalMan]

I've always been intrigued by the "every life is precious and sacred" v. pro-capital punishment dynamic.

They say it's not about life, it's about guilt. I always ask them if it would be acceptable to abort a fetus if had murdered someone.

[Razgovory]

I always wondered how Libertardians and Jesus freaks managed to co-exist in one party, given how the guiding philosophies of those groups are so different.  It turns out the answer is "very tenuously".

That's always been the case.

[Ed Anger]

I tolerate the religious right, because in the end, it is the lefties annoy me more.

Plus, repressed catholic and baptist school girls? HOOOTTTTTTTTTTTTTT.

[Fate]

Those repressed catholic schoolgirls are most likely voting Democrat. 

[Hansmeister]

A split in the GOP over this in the works? Some of the guys they quoted there seem a bit weird to me. I can't imagine a Republican using the term social-justice in a non-pejorative way, for example. And that Merritt guy wrote a book about how God is Green ( I googled him, it made me suspicious). I wonder how big a slice of the GOP pie is represented by people who would be completely siding with Democrats if it weren't for abortion and gay marriage. I can't imagine it's huge.

It's no secret that libertarian-types and religious-types are not super-compatible ideologically, but I've always looked at that difference as one more of focus and emphasis than one of outright conflict. What I mean by that is, that most evangelicals don't mind cutting taxes. It does seem a bit like the Tea Party faction is making no bones about the fact that they intend to completely ignore issues important to the religious faction though. (The ideological conflict for them seems like it would be stronger--I dunno.)

If the fundies do bail, can the GOP win anything without them? I know they might not be a massive chunk of the party, but they're certainly a loud one. And one big enough to make the party a lot less competitive if they stay home.

Since the Tea Party critics in this piece are well-known left-wing evangelicals who support the Democrats anyway it's pretty much a worthless article.  It's just political spin masquerading as journalism.

[Razgovory]

I thought the Tea party claimed to be bi-partisan.

[Darth Wagtaros]

The tea party is a decentralized social construct.  Like Gozer it is whatever it wants to be.

[Sheilbh]

I don't buy the tea party-libertarian angle.  I think they're perhaps exceptionally loony on economic policy - reaching desperately into Ron Paul territory.  But at that Tea Party Convention, for example, the biggest applause lines were still about abortion and, to a lesser extent, foreign policy.

[DontSayBanana]

Since the Tea Party critics in this piece are well-known left-wing evangelicals who support the Democrats anyway it's pretty much a worthless article.  It's just political spin masquerading as journalism.

Kettle say: Hi, Pot, pleased to meet you.

[Martinus]

This I find to be quite important

But they've also banished the social issues that are the focus of many evangelical Christians to the background.

America is weird really, its the only place where you still get real right vs. left (that comes right to mind, there obviously are others)
Economic concerns are very much secondary, the true right vs. left stuff is social issues and on these in Europe the left has long since won and the right packed in and politics became about the battle for the centre with 'gays are fine, abortion is up to you, etc...' being just utterly the norm (in the UK at least. Not going to speak for the whole of europe with that one...)
Interesting development if this is true.

Poland is like the US then. Here capitalism and free market economy have won, and the real battle is about social stuff.